Guest post by Frances Jones
I’ve never found it easy to keep New Year’s resolutions. Often, they are admirable but just not sufficiently motivating and are inevitably dropped before ever really achieving anything. Last year, though, I decided I would practice the piano more often and also give a concert, however low-key, for my students, most of whom were under the age of 10. One of the pieces I re-learnt and performed was Germaine Tailleferre’s Impromptu, a wonderfully spirited piece with an oft-repeated motif that ducks and dives through many keys before finally coming to rest with a ritardando and arpeggiated passage alighting on the tonic.
Rediscovering this piece led me to think of Tailleferre’s First Piano Concerto. I say rediscovering because Germaine Tailleferre’s music was the subject of my undergraduate thesis, back in 2005. It wasn’t long before I was listening to the concerto, now much more easily available on Youtube, and recalling an afternoon spent poring over the score in the dimly lit depths (or so it seemed to me) of the British Library.
Tailleferre wrote her first piano concerto in 1924 and, in a departure from the Romantic style of her earlier pieces for piano, embraced the neo-Classicism that had been emerging in France in the early years of the 20th century and that she had deployed in her string quartet of 1919. As far as I’m aware, there has been just one recording to date, by the University of California Santa Cruz Orchestra:
The first movement is in sonata form, but foreshadows the neo-Classical style of Stravinsky in his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto with its similarity to concerto grosso. The instrumentation, too, is reminiscent of earlier times, with strings, trumpet, horn, oboe, bassoon, flutes and timpani. The piano and orchestra start together in the first bar, and the musical themes are shared in a joyful back and forth full of counterpoint and syncopation. The opening theme, a descending melody with a repeated rhythm, is heard over a staccato bass which really bounces along and immediately conjures up a sense of exuberance. Later on, the harmonies are more Romantic and the piano is more obviously accompanied by the orchestra, but the melody is still propelled by a driving rhythm. The joyous, energetic character returns as the opening material is repeated, exchanging fragments of melody, overlapping and answering, until the final bars.
The second movement has a different feel. Indeed, when I was researching this work for my thesis, I was so struck by the similarity of the slow movement to the slow movement in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, that it led me to consider the influences that this concerto may have had upon Ravel. (Ravel wrote his concerto in 1934, and the two composers were good friends). This is a subject for another time, but it makes for an interesting discussion. The movement starts with solo piano, and a continuously evolving melody which defies a clear sense of beat and only becomes clearer when the flute enters in bar 4. This emphasis on melody harks back to the earlier style of her piano works, in which melodies evolved over a more static bass line. It’s a beautiful movement, wistful and yearning; it builds to heavy chords, anguish almost palpable in each, and subsides, the strings accompanying the piano to resolve onto a major chord, the sun shining again on the rain-soaked pavement (if you’ll excuse the weather analogy).
We return in the third movement to the uplifting character of the first and indeed, to a more obviously neo-Classical style. But it’s not without its individualism. The themes are characterized by off beat rhythms that cut through the texture but there is lyricism, too, always urgent, pushing forward, both orchestra and soloist involved in an intense communication. There’s a joyful, ascending
piano melody, followed by a conversation with the flute and oboe and, finally, a cadenza where the pianist emerges into the limelight. However it’s the interweaving of the melody through the orchestral parts, specifically flute, oboe and trumpet, that I really enjoy in this movement. Towards the end, the syncopated motif is shared around the orchestra, the soloist running up and down the piano in scalic passages until the trumpet breaks through the texture to end with a triumphant flourish.
Tailleferre’s Piano Concerto was premièred in London by Alfred Cortot in 1924. Although performed many times in the decade following its publication in 1925, the work has not since achieved a fraction of the commercial success enjoyed by other 20th century concertos. It perhaps just doesn’t quite have that level of virtuosity attained by other composers, such as Ravel in his Piano Concerto in G, or Shostakovich in his First Cello Concerto. Its neo-Classical style and lack of a really prominent part for the soloist may also have contributed to its gradual disappearance from the concert platform. However, the more I (re)listen, the more I’m drawn to this work which appears like a burst of musical sunshine from the Paris of the 1920s. I’d love to hear it performed live. Perhaps now, 100 years on, might be the time for its renaissance.
Frances Jones read music at York University, followed by a PGCE at Cambridge. She is Music Lead at a school in West London and also teaches piano.
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 